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One Photo Focus – July

It is July’s One Photo Focus time and this week I feel very honoured that Stacy has picked a photo I submitted to her. Thank you Stacy xx And I look forward to seeing all the other edits…

So why is it so, so hard at times to become inspirational when you are trying to edit your own photo for a photo challenge? To me it just seems easier when editing another person’s photo or finding a picture that represents a particular topic or tone. I knew what I wanted to do… but getting there needed some thought. I wanted to create an oil paint image… without using Photoshop Oil Paint… (simply because it doesn’t work on my desktop – God knows why)

Even though I like the original image, what I didn’t like was the main house on the left… in the image. So I knew that I had to remove that… so it was off to Photoshop initially… to clone out that house. I then added a curves adjustment layer and played around with the mid-tones, shadows and highlights using the targeting tool.

But even with the house gone and a curves layer… I still didn’t like the sky.. so it was either add a texture or a cloud overlay… I opted for the texture with an oil paint feel to it that I got from The Coffee Shop Blog called Golden Oils Textures and used a luminosity mask to get the texture exactly where I wanted it. Then I used Nik Color Efex 2 and added 3 separate photo filters (Cool Silver, Monday Morning, and Glamour Glow – played around with sliders in Nik)… and then once back into Photoshop, I then saved the photo and sent it back into Lightroom so I could finish my processing in Lightroom.

Once the photo was back into Lightroom I added a Free Western Preset to the Photo which I got from Serge Ramelli and I altered the values of the sliders and played around with the Split Toning… The photo was coming more like a painting and that is what I wanted.. so after adding a couple of radial filters to highlight certain areas.. using the Print Module of Lightroom, I added the photo to a frame.

14 Comments on “One Photo Focus – July”

Bren, this is beautiful! I love the direction you took – something I never would have thought of. And you taught me a few things too. First, I need to pay more attention to Serge’s YouTube videos so I don’t miss the opportunity to get some of his presets (thanks for sharing the link!), and second, LR’s print module allows you to insert a frame. Who knew??

Thanks so much for submitting your photo for all of us to have fun with this month!

Sorry for the late reply to your comment but it ended up in Spam… and I missed it… thank you for your comment xx I think it is easier to edit someone else’s photo simply because you are adding your own style of processing it… when it comes to your own photo, you have to think of a totally different style of editing.. than you normally do.

Hi Bren, What an involved process to go through! And I can imagine how hard it is to work on your own image when you know another 15 people will who can feel a lot more detached than you! Thanks for letting us play with your image.